"Liberty is not a means to a political end. It is itself the highest political end." -Lord Acton

Monday, February 09, 2009

Thank you, Steve Wozniak

I'm currently reading Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's autobiography,iWoz. I expected to find stories of entrepreneurial genius. I did not expect to find libertarian undertones.

Describing a scheme the government used to try to get him drafted for the Vietnam War, Woz writes,

From that point on, I saw that the government would do whatever it could to beat a citizen, that it was just a game. And this was the exact opposite of the way I had thought of government my whole life. That episode taught me an important lesson about government, authority, even the police. You couldn't trust them to do the right thing...I can't even describe to you the shock and disgust I felt at our government: that they would play this kind of game with my life, that they didn't care about people the way that my dad had taught me. I'd thought the government was here to protect us, but that turned out to be wrong. I now believed the government was just out to do what was good for the government and would lie about anything they could get away with. They were not there to do sensible things, and they played with my life in the worst possible way. (79, 80)